Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (2 page)

The Hebei hills are steep, marked by faces of open rock, and I drove through villages with rugged names: Ox Heart Mountain, Double Peak Village, Mountain Spirit Temple. The Great Wall shadowed these red-tiled towns. Usually the fortifications followed the ridgeline, high above the fields, and I’d catch glimpses as I wound through the hills. The Ming dynasty built these structures, mostly during the sixteenth century, and they had done their work well—the stone foundation and gray brick walls still clung firmly to the ridge. Sometimes a wall dipped into a valley, and in these low places the structure had been harvested as clean as the fields. The brick facing was completely gone: all that remained was the foundation and the hard-tamped earth interior, pockmarked
and crumbling from the elements. This naked wall crossed the valley floor and climbed once more into the hills, until finally, after it reached a certain elevation, the bricks reappeared. The line of destruction was level on opposite sides of the valley, as if marking the tide of some great torrent that had swept through Hebei. But this flood had been human, and the watermark was one of motivation. It measured exactly how high people were willing to climb for free bricks.

In the village of Yingfang, I stopped to examine one of these bare sections, and a farmer named Wang Guo’an joined me in the road. “It was in better shape when I was young,” he said. “A lot of it got torn down during the Cultural Revolution.”

He was referring to the political campaigns that lasted from 1966 to 1976, when Mao Zedong encouraged the Chinese to attack anything traditional and “feudal.” Some sections of the Great Wall were damaged during this period, and Wang could remember villagers in Yingfang tearing down their local fortifications and using the materials for other building projects.

He took me behind his home, where old bricks had been piled into neat four-foot-tall stacks. “Those are from the Great Wall,” he said. “You can tell from the mortar—that’s the kind they used in the old days. They came from a big tower in the village.”

I asked if people still ripped up the wall, and he shook his head. “The government around here won’t let you do it anymore,” he said. “These bricks were first taken forty years ago. People used them to build a house, which was recently demolished. Now we’ll use them to build something else.”

In these crowded landscapes, everything was a potential resource. Hebei is about the same size as the state of Washington, but the population is more than eleven times higher—sixty-eight million people total. Hills have been carved into crop terraces; roads serve to dry vegetables; passing cars double as threshers. If there’s wall within reach, it’s used, sometimes twice. Able-bodied people often lead double lives—they might farm for a while and then head to the cities. They serve on construction crews; they do roadwork; they spend time on factory assembly lines. The most jobs I saw listed on a single business card was twenty-
seven. That was in Shanxi Province, just beyond the Hebei border, and I met the man at a funeral.

In this part of China, even funerals have a bustling air, and I stopped for processions all across the north. They took place in the road, as public as the threshing, and usually the participants invited me to the banquet that followed. It was possible to drive from funeral to funeral all the way across Hebei and Shanxi, and in fact there were people who lived this way—an endless road trip where every stop represented somebody else’s final terminus. In the town of Xinrong, I met Wei Fu and his wife, who specialized in performing traditional Shanxi opera at memorial services. They drove an old Beijing-brand flatbed truck, and they had customized the back for performances. In Xinrong they parked on the main street, set the brake, removed the railings, and erected an awning and two huge Peavey speakers. Within half an hour they had a stage, and hundreds of people gathered in the street to watch. The funeral was a seven-day event; it was especially elaborate because the dead man had owned the biggest shop in Xinrong, the Prosperous Fountainhead Store. The family arranged the man’s coffin right at the entrance, and even in death he was doing good business—the street crowd overflowed into the shop, where people bumped past the coffin and bought snacks to eat while listening to opera.

A day later I stopped at another funeral just after the grave had been filled. It was in the countryside, on an open plain marked by a huge Great Wall signal tower. There weren’t any cities nearby—in China, where the law requires most citizens to be cremated, only outlying rural regions are allowed to conduct burials. Near the tower, twenty men and women had gathered, wearing white sackcloth tied at the waist with red rope. In the distance a massive government propaganda sign read: “Protecting the Arable Earth Means Protecting Our Line of Life.”

I was greeted by the only attendant not dressed in mourning white. He was sixty-nine years old, a pudgy man in a blue suit and cap; his round moon face shone with sweat. He wore the biggest smile I’d seen since yesterday’s funeral, when I’d chatted with Wei Fu, the leader of the opera troupe. There’s always at least one happy person at a Chinese funeral.

“Come over, come over!” the pudgy man said, pulling at my arm. “We’re almost finished!”

He gave me a laminated name card. The front featured a picture of two hands clasped in a businessman’s shake, along with the words:

Zhang Baolong

Feng Shui Master

Services for the Entire Length of the Dragon,
From Beginning to End

Traditionally, feng shui masters evaluate the relationship between buildings and landscapes, trying to create harmony between what is natural and what is manmade. In ancient times, these beliefs often influenced military and political affairs. Northwest of Beijing, the Ming dynasty avoided building the Great Wall along a twenty-mile-long ridge because of its proximity to the imperial tombs. From a strategic point of view, the ridge was perfect for defenseworks, but feng shui masters believed it represented a
longmai
, or “dragon vein.” Any construction that violated the vein could bring bad fortune to the Ming, and so the ridge was left alone. The emperor went to the trouble of building walls farther to the north, where the terrain was less defensible and required more extensive fortifications.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, they attacked many cultural traditions as superstitious, including religion, fortune-telling, and feng shui analysis. Even when the reforms of Deng Xiaoping introduced greater tolerance, some practices never recovered—Taoism, for example, attracts few believers in today’s China. But faith in feng shui has proven to be resilient, largely because it’s connected to business. Good feng shui means good fortune, and people are willing to pay for expert analysis. Zhang Baolong was one of the new masters—he negotiated the market economy as skillfully as he did the geography. His business card listed twenty-seven separate services, ranging from “selecting marriage partners” to “choosing grave sites”—this was the “length of the dragon, from beginning to end.” He also offered to install wood beams for houses, determine locations for mining, and treat “unusual
diseases.” He built coffins. (“You must supply your own wood.”) He assisted in the carrying of wedding sedans. On the card, service number twenty-one involved moving bones to a new grave site—a common task in a nation undergoing a construction boom.

“I chose this site!” Zhang said proudly, pointing at the patch of recently dug earth. In front of the tomb, mourners took turns kowtowing: each person knelt, burned a stack of paper grave money, and wailed as he knocked his head against the ground. Nobody seemed to mind my presence. In northern China, I had learned that funerals are almost always welcoming, in part because people rarely see foreigners. Nevertheless, I dropped my voice to a whisper: “Who’s the funeral for?”

But Zhang Baolong didn’t seem to hear my question; he was still talking about feng shui. “It’s arranged east-west,” he continued, pointing at the patch of earth. “The head faces west, and the feet are to the east. And that tree I planted is a poplar. We plant poplars for men and willows for women; the purpose is to tell the soul where the grave is. This particular place is good for a lot of reasons. The position of that signal tower is very important, for example. You see, this place is good because it’s high, and there’s water in that stream to the east. And you have the signal tower above, which serves to protect the tomb. A person buried in this location will have many wealthy descendants, who will rise to high civil, military, and scholarly positions.”

The men had finished kowtowing and now it was the women’s turn: one by one, they touched their heads to the ground. The women were louder and their cries echoed across the valley.

“My father and grandfather were both feng shui masters,” Zhang continued. “We’ve always done this in my family. And everybody in my family lives for a long time! My father lived to be ninety-five, and my mother was ninety-eight when she died. My grandmother lived to be ninety-nine!”

The keening rose another pitch. I wondered if a conversation about longevity might be more appropriate at another time, but Zhang kept talking. “I have three sons and three daughters,” he said. “My sons are feng shui masters, too! And one of my daughters”—he beamed, perhaps at the thought of security in this world and the next—“is a nurse!”

THE WEATHER HELD PERFECT
across Hebei and Shanxi—cool, crisp mornings, the sunlight falling sharp across terraced fields. Usually I awoke early, but there was never any schedule or plan. I tried to keep the Great Wall in sight, and I stopped whenever something interested me. I figured out the route as I went; on many days I traveled less than one hundred miles. Rural driving tended to be slow, because often something was happening in the street—a crop threshing, a sheep crossing, a funeral procession. The roads themselves were completely unpredictable. A thin red line on my Sinomap might represent a brand-new asphalt road, but it could also be a dirt track or even a dry creekbed. Quite often the routes were in the process of being improved. Beginning in 1998, the government had invested heavily in rural roads, partly as a response to the Asian financial crisis, and this project was still under way when I took my journey.

In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis. The first major construction campaign of motor roads began in 1920, when a drought resulted in a terrible famine across the north. It was hard to transport food to people who were starving—China’s road system, which dated to imperial times, had been designed for horse-drawn carts. The American Red Cross sponsored a project to build modern roads suitable for trucks and automobiles, and in October of 1920 they began construction in Shandong Province. They hired local farmers, many of whom had been close to starvation, and the new roads allowed relief trucks to arrive. Oliver J. Todd, an American engineer who directed the Shandong project, estimated that it provided food and fuel, directly or indirectly, to half a million people.

The Red Cross eventually built roads in four northern provinces, and their work was so successful that Todd was hired by the Chinese government. He stayed for eighteen years, supervising highway construction all across the country. On a single road-building project in 1928, he had a crew of two hundred thousand laborers—more people than were employed by the entire U.S. road system at that time. The number of passenger cars in China remained low—in 1922, Beijing
had approximately 1,500—but interest was intense. Chinese cities held car shows; the Shanghai newspaper
Shenbao
ran a weekly “Automobile Supplement.” By 1935, China had fifty thousand miles of good earthen motor roads, and it seemed only a matter of time before the nation would experience an auto boom.

In the end, that boom was postponed for more than half a century. The Japanese invaded northern China in 1937, and the war crippled the young auto market. After Mao came to power, decades of Communist economics made it impossible for people to buy cars. The road system of rural China languished, and it wasn’t until the Reform years that the government could improve such infrastructure on a major scale. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis provided motivation, somewhat like the famines of old. The government wanted to offset the economic threat, and it also saw an opportunity to finally inspire the long-delayed auto boom. History was being repeated: this was China’s second wave of car pioneers, and they were essentially starting over. In 2001, the year that I got my license, the country had a population of over 1.2 billion, but there were fewer than ten million passenger vehicles. The ratio was 128 people for every vehicle, similar to the United States in 1911.

For my road trip, I rented a Chinese-made Jeep Cherokee from a Beijing company called Capital Motors. It was a new industry—even five years earlier, almost nobody would have thought of renting a car for a weekend trip. But now the business had started to develop, and my local Capital Motors branch had a fleet of about fifty vehicles, mostly Chinese-made Volkswagen Santanas and Jettas. They were small sedans, built on the same basic model as the VW Fox that was once sold in the States. At Capital Motors, I often rented Jettas for weekend trips, and there was an elaborate ritual to these transactions. First, I paid my twenty-five dollars per day and filled out a mountain of paperwork. Next, the head mechanic opened the trunk to prove that there was a spare tire and a jack. Finally we toured the Jetta’s exterior, recording dents and scratches onto a diagram that represented the shape of a car. This often took a while—Beijing traffic is not gentle, and it was my responsibility to sketch every door ding and bumper dent. After we documented the prenuptial damage, the mechanic turned the ignition
and showed me the gas gauge. Sometimes it was half full; sometimes there was a quarter tank. Occasionally he studied it and announced: “Three-eighths.” It was my responsibility to return the car with exactly the same amount of fuel. Week to week, it was never the same, and one day I decided to make my own contribution to the fledgling industry.